The Rest is Weight (UQP Short Fiction) (9 page)

She doesn’t look back until she’s almost out of sight down the highway, carrying her shoes in one hand and her wig in the other. Shrunk at both ends, she looks tiny, a flying ant. Andy stays on the roundabout and watches her until the little prints on his cheek fade into the general cold feeling.

His palms are still tingling. He checks over his shoulder one last time, just in case the devil turned up late. But it’s just him on the roundabout, him and the weight in his pocket and his dumb ideas.

The streetlight flickers off. The man in the orange Torana pulls up to start the early shift. Andy pushes himself off the trolley, kicks it, and heads home, carrying that itch, all the way.

The shipping views

Water views
, Vic would have said about the Box if he’d ever had a visitor. It was true that if you hauled yourself up the side of it, one foot on the steel lock rail, you could get a good look at the flat brown square of the stormwater catchment, dug out between factories like a moat. It was a little joke Vic had between himself and the Box.

Of course, there weren’t any visitors in the months Vic had been living there. The old blue shipping container he’d found empty and abandoned in a disused industrial lot barely fitted him among the bits and pieces he’d collected. He marvelled at himself sometimes when the planes woke him; it used to be just him and his swag, but as soon as he moved into the Box he started filling it. Even with no money and no particular desire to accumulate possessions, he felt the tug of stuff and picked up things off the street, insulating his few square metres with books, useful things that needed fixing, and un-useful things that didn’t.

The planes were a part of it too. He needed insulating from the regular Sydenham skyquakes that rattled the Box, rattling him awake at six each morning. He’d look up at the flat steel roof and think about where they were going, those loud tin birds, and after a while he’d get to thinking where the Box had been. They would have the same conversation, as if Vic were a little kid who never tired of his favourite story.

Tell me about Hong Kong
, he’d say wistfully, or Liverpool or New York. The Box would describe it for him: the way the junks cut like feathers through reflected lantern light on the harbour, or the men shouted
hey-oi
through a fog half mist, half factory, or the shine of the cut-glass buildings made even Liberty humble. And Vic would lie back with his hands laced under his head and his lids closed listening, dreaming up pictures of these cities behind his eyes. He came for the change, to have a place, but stayed for the stories of elsewhere. Like the things he collected, staying in the Box was something he did almost in spite of himself.

Days, the Box heated up like a bastard and Vic would go for strolls. A stroll was what he liked: it lacked the purpose of a walk. He’d skirt the factories, picking up bits and pieces. If he got hungry he’d pop by the Woolies bin for a surprise feast or wander the back lanes behind Marrickville shops to pick fruit and veg from the boxes lining the loading docks. He never took more than he ate right away, but he tried always to bring a little something back for the Box. Vic figured that if it wasn’t him who wanted to collect things, it must be his house. Calling the Box
house
was another of his little jokes.

Often the things he found would prompt a particular story. A lone sandal was for Cairo, a trolley wheel, Detroit. When he found the little wooden boat he knew that when he got home he would lie back and close his eyes and say,
Tell me about the ocean.

The ocean story was different. It wasn’t about anywhere, really. It scared him a little.

Vic found the boat in a pile of broken glass next to the Vinnies bin and it took him a moment to work out that the glass used to be a bottle and the boat used to be stuck. Its mast hung by a string. His stroll was finished now he’d found something to take back, so he started walking home, thinking how good it would be to hear the ocean story.

When he got back to the lot the gate was shut. This had never happened before, and it puzzled Vic. He waved through the chain link at the cheerful, rusting blue rectangle that sat among the concrete and weeds. It seemed okay, so he carefully slid the little boat under the wire and climbed over the top. He was an awkward climber, but he got there. He gave the fence a little wink of victory, picked up the boat and went home to bed.

That night Vic cradled the boat in his hand. It was only about the size of a small bird or the little fish you throw back in the sea. After looking at it for a while, he lay down and closed his eyes, took a deep breath and said,
Tell me about the ocean
.

Waking before dawn to the day’s first skyquake, Vic rolled off his foam, almost crushing the delicate thing in his hand, which, when he recovered himself, turned out to be a small wooden boat. Which meant he was at home in the Box. When its shuddering stopped, he got up off the floor, gently put the boat down on a pile of cloth off-cuts, then opened the doors to inhale the fresh sea air. The Box tipped to its side to roll down a wave and the horizon lifted its corners up in front of him like a picnic finishing, dropping back and then rising into the sky. From the wave’s crest Vic saw how far off they were from everything; it was ocean all the way to the edge of the world. Lost. He panicked, nearly shutting his finger in the door. Sucking it, he closed his eyes and spoke a litany of landing places:
singaporesanfranciscohanoilisbonoslotokyo
, he said, lids clamped against the noise of sea outside and feeling his chest with one hand to steady his heart.

Vic opened his eyes, took a deep breath, and opened the door again before fear could take back his hands. It was concrete. Weeds grew. With relief he stepped onto the solid lot.

Whatcha do that for?
he said to the Box but it didn’t answer; sulking, probably. Best leave it alone today and stroll, forget how the ground might turn against you.

He closed his doors behind him, slid the lock rail in place and got three-quarters of the way across to the gate before he remembered it was closed. But looking up he saw it wasn’t. Two men stood just inside it, pointing at things and talking.

Vic hesitated. The men were new. He looked back at the Box, which sat silent with the threat of dreams. It might do the sea thing again, but the men might be worse. He decided to chance it while the ground was still there and tried to walk invisibly through the gate.

‘Hey, mate.’

The men had spotted him. One was large and white and grubby, the other neat and short.

The large one came at him, waving his arms around.

‘This is private property, mate,’ he said. The neat one nodded from behind. ‘What are ya doin?’

Vic looked at them and said
listening
, but he was so used to talking to the Box that the words didn’t come out right and he surprised himself by emitting a sort of guttural noise.

The men conferred with glances and decided.
Vic looked down for answers, but he saw the concrete wasn’t about to cooperate: the weeds were becoming like the stick-mast of the little boat, starting to bob disturbingly as if on string. He glanced at the gate space between him and his stroll.

The large one said something Vic couldn’t catch. Their words flew off like gulls. Then the neat one spoke: ‘Maybe we should.’ He got out his phone and pressed its buttons.

Another plane cut the sky, and Vic saw the man hold his telephone at arm’s length while the earth shook. The gesture reminded him: white arms testing needles, false smiles that tranquillised, bed straps and blunt spoons and the bars you saw the sea through, saw all the harbours in the one so that junks feather cut the light and men
hey-oi
’ed and cut glass humbled.

Vic wants to run. The plane’s growl has faded to a low hum and the neat man is talking to his machine, and the gates feel froth between their toes as the tide comes in. Through his broken boots the water creeps, and over tongues to soak Vic’s single sock and raw foot. He shakes the sock foot out and looks at the men, who seem unruffled by the rising sea.

When the car comes he’s already treading water, though the blue and white craft seems made to slide through the ocean’s skin like a razor. The new men are like hospitals, gentle and brutal. He lets them take him – it’s hard to get air, now – but he wants to tell the Box. Looking back between hospitals, he watches.

The Box floats up, blue on the grey waves with all its things inside, and sails, loosed from its moorings. The whole fence is underwater now, no barrier to seafaring. Taking its stories home.

Under him a motor coughs and outside Sydenham swims, pressed against the glass. Vic closes his eyes and says,
Tell me again, tell me about the ocean.

A selfish prayer

I am six years old and my sister Jude is picking mulberries.

‘Trust me,’ says Jude. ‘I can reach.’

I sit back on the flat part of the roof and smooth out my skirt. Jude pulls the branch towards her with one hand and picks the berries off with the other. Her grubby feet are hooked against the metal, her knees in the guttering. I watch her balance between me and the tree. Her belly swings over the drop.

Sometimes, while I watch, Jude slips. My lump of a sister crashes to the ground and splits open like a ripe watermelon. Mum comes out screaming at me, grabbing at Jude’s body. I start to cry because it’s all my fault, and Jude reaches an arm back from the branches to shush me. But it doesn’t happen like that today.

Today Jude’s bum lands safely on her heels and she pours endless berries into my lap. I wonder how she can hold so many, but Jude has all the powers of a big girl, and then some.

‘My dad’s in the
ira
,’ says Jude. She sucks her fat, purple fingers.

‘What’s the
ira
?’

I pick out the squashed ones first so my dress won’t stain so badly. I pop them in my mouth. Their juice is warm from the sun.

‘He lives in Ireland. He smuggled all these explosives into London. He blew up a whole police station.’

‘Mum says your dad went to Perth,’ I tell her.

Jude pulls my hair, hard. ‘It’s a secret, silly,’ she says.

I am seven years old. I am standing in the doorway watching Jude’s hair. It’s yellow like mine, but thicker, much prettier. It’s unfair.

The place smells of earwax and bandaids, and of the thing they put in the toilet to make it flush blue. I remember cold steel up my nose and sharp pain in my bum and I’m glad it’s Jude’s turn.

‘Kids make things up,’ the doctor tells my mother.

‘She’s sixteen.’ Mum has a hand on Jude’s knee and Jude is staring at nothing. I can only see her from the back but I know she is staring at nothing because her head hasn’t moved at all since she sat down.

‘She’ll grow out of it.’

‘See? There’s nothing wrong with me,’ Jude says. ‘Can we go now?’

Listen to her
, I tell Mum. I have already started talking to her in my head. She hasn’t learned to read my thoughts yet.

I am twenty-seven years old and Jude is on my couch. Her hair is still prettier than mine, but it’s grown stringy and flat. I play with it while she sleeps, looping the strands around my fingers.

Mum finally agreed she needed a break, so Jude is staying with me for a whole month. I’m working from home, finishing a short documentary. Editing pleases me. The parameters are reduced to what you have. There are no more contingencies. The risk of something ruining the shot has passed. I would almost find it relaxing, if it wasn’t for the disruption of construction work next door.

Mum rings every afternoon to make sure Jude has taken her medication, and every afternoon I tell her Jude is fine.

I have a crowd of photographs on the mantelpiece: of Jude and me, of Jude and Mum, of the three of us together. The photos of Jude by herself are not on display. Pictures of her alone frighten me because I have no way of knowing what she sees. I might remember myself holding the camera, but I have no proof that I was there. When Jude fills a picture her eyes don’t see me like others’ do.

In my work I lean to realism. I try hard to become almost invisible, to get natural shots. It’s why I get a lot of documentary work. With Jude there is no almost. I might as well not exist.

Jude never moved out, but she’s left home a hundred times. She wears a bracelet on her wrist, engraved with our number. People find her in strange places and ring us. Luna Park, the fish market, and once on a boat. Music calms her down so Mum used to take a Walkman with her when we had to pick her up. She has heaps of tapes, mostly Simon and Garfunkel.

I remember Jude sitting on the harbour wall. I must have been twelve or thirteen, because Mum was waiting in the car. I already had a share in the responsibility for my sister. I had also learned by that age not to try talking her out of whatever she was in.

She was swinging her bare feet over the water, singing ‘Silent Night’. Mum made multiple copies of the tapes. She left that song out because the voices made Jude anxious.

I climbed up on the wall beside Jude and started to sing along. The water was clear and blue. The light glittered so hard that it stung my eyes. A few metres away, Jude’s pink plastic sandals were floating out to sea. I wished I had a way to bottle the image.

‘It’s not Christmas yet, is it?’ Jude said.

‘Soon,’ I told her. ‘What do you want?’

‘All is calm, all is bright,’ said Jude.

‘Sure is.’ I put my arm around her shoulders.

She got new sandals. I got my first camera. I’d been asking Mum for one from inside my head for a while. I’d also worked out that I had to drop hints out loud. Mum still hadn’t learned to hear me. She might have had room in her head for more than one child, but Jude had more than one voice.

Jude is in my backyard singing ‘The 59th St Bridge Song’. The bulldozer next door starts up and I ignore it for a while, trying to cut this take in the right place and wishing life had never gone digital.

When I look up, Jude is nowhere to be seen. I walk outside, keeping my movements calm. I find her crouched beside a pot plant against my back wall, watching the machine from her hiding place.

‘T-Rex,’ she says. Her shoulders are shaking.

‘Jude, chill out, it can’t get you if I’m here,’ I say, and crouch down to hold her. She’s not crying. She pushes me away, puts her hands to the ground to lift herself up. I notice that her wrists have grown thin.

‘We’ve made living biological attractions so astounding that they’ll capture the imagination of the entire planet,’ Jude declares as she heaves herself up.

‘Come inside now, Jude, okay?’

She follows me, but she’s still talking. ‘God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man. Man destroys God. Man creates dinosaurs . . .’

I grab her medication, then stand on a chair and fumble for the tape on top of the bookshelf. Jude throws herself on the couch, sending shudders through the floorboards, and I almost lose my balance. Books fall out from under my chest like heavy scales.

‘The lysine contingency! What about the lysine
contingency?’

I can’t believe she can still recite all this. I wish I had her memory sometimes.

It takes me half an hour to convince her to take the pills, and her another hour to fall asleep on the couch.

I bring my laptop into the lounge room to work so I can watch her sleep. I find it hard to work with someone else in the room, but eventually I get lulled into a rhythm by her even breathing.

Jude pestered and pestered to see
Jurassic Park
, but Mum said it would give her nightmares. Nightmares are what you have when you’re asleep, Jude has delusions, but I didn’t point that out. Eventually Mum had to go out somewhere and I snuck out with Jude to see it on the sly.

I thought it was a bad movie, but the kind where you still enjoy yourself because you’re laughing. I remember thinking that this lets the filmmakers off the hook. Jude beside me, terrified of animatronic dinosaurs, had one take on it, I had the opposite, but we were both entertained. Even in the boring parts, I could daydream about what I would do with all those resources.

I knew we wouldn’t be able to hide the crime, so I acceded to Jude’s requests for plastic dinosaur eggs and commemorative plastic cups but balked at a t-shirt. I wanted us to get caught anyway. I was that age. I didn’t know it would scar her, but it could have been anything. Mum didn’t agree. She was pissed off for weeks, and has since referred to the film as ‘that movie’.

Despite her fear of dinosaurs, I knew Jude had enjoyed herself. For a short time afterwards, we shared something private, something Mum didn’t have. Every night before we went to sleep, Jude and I would have the same exact conversation.

‘What do you call a blind dinosaur?’

‘I don’t know, Jude.’

‘A do-you-think-he-saurus. What do you call a blind dinosaur’s dog?’

‘I don’t know, Jude.’

‘A do-you-think-he-saurus Rex.’

‘Goodnight, Jude.’

Jude wasn’t difficult all the time. We did the normal things that sisters do, even though she’s nine years older than me. She took me shopping and we got ice creams, perved on boys, stole costume jewellery and makeup from the cheap shops. Jude was an amazing thief before she got diagnosed. Medication killed her stealth.

When I was being bullied at school, she was in the hospital. When I was studying for my
hsc
, she was in the bathroom, trying to overdose on iron tablets and cooking sherry. When I came home crying after my first relationship ended, she was asleep in a haze of downers.

Sometimes I thought of our different fathers as a kind of blessing. I could always accept half of my sister. But when she raged at me, I knew it was her fault these men had left us behind. When she spat and swore and threw things at me, I sometimes wished my father would appear at the door and take me with him. But he had his own family, and a normal life.

She’s calmed down a lot since then. I know this because I’ve been told. Mum has said as much to me every month, as part of her regular update. I’ve heard it a thousand times, on a hundred phones, in a dozen countries.

I left home when Jude was the age I am now. I came back for Christmas about once every three years. I preferred to drop in and out of their lives, and they didn’t seem to mind. Their life, I should say, singular.

‘I need to have my own life,’ I said. Straight out of high school, I took off up north, alone for the first time. I took odd jobs fruit picking, and met people from other countries. The ease of their travels was a shock to me. I realised that with only myself to organise, there would be no shit fight to get out the door, no hours of reassurance and repetition to soothe my sister’s fears. When it’s just me, I don’t have to check under the car for velociraptors.

I’ve been back for six months. I have few possessions, few acquaintances, and few adult memories of this city. When I arrived at Mum’s house, I expected Jude to be angry, or at least sullen. She acted as though I had never left.

‘If anything happens to her . . .’ Mum said, and then she looked over my shoulder into the street. Sometimes I think she’s on the lookout for dinosaurs, out of habit. It is also a habit of hers to leave her sentences unfinished. I guessed it was a plea and not a threat.

‘I’ll call you, I promise. It’s only a month. We’ll be okay, won’t we, Jude?’

‘We’ll be okay,’ Jude said. ‘Promise. A month.’ She hugged Mum and followed me to the car.

As I drove away, Jude leaned out of the window and waved until the house was out of sight. I thought,
I’m doing this in case anything happens to you, Mum. You’re supposed to thank me
.

I think about calling Mum while Jude sleeps on the couch, but I know she will offer to come and pick her up early. I have one more week to go, and I will manage, though that life I always wanted for myself is looking sweeter every minute.

Late in the afternoon Jude wakes and sees me. She doesn’t smile.

‘Hi.’ I close my laptop. ‘Want a cup of tea?’

‘Yes.’

I bring in the mugs. Jude places hers carefully on the ground and pats the coffee table. I sit down.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I lost it.’

‘It’s okay.’ I stroke her hair and smile. ‘You know it’s
okay. You’re getting better, you just still have these episodes sometimes.’

She smiles at something over my shoulder.

‘It was my fault too,’ I admit, ‘I got stuck into this cut and forgot it was pill time.’

‘I’ll get you another one,’ she says.

‘Another what?’

She reaches out to touch my watch. I remember she lost mine ten years ago, dropped it down a stormwater drain. The velociraptors were living down there, she explained, and they needed to be pacified with gold. It was only a cheap plastic watch, but to her it was a chance to quiet the voices, to buy a moment’s peace.

I put my hand over her hand.

‘Hey Jude, what do you call a blind dinosaur?’

She smiles and groans and rubs her face in the pillow.

‘It’s harmless,’ I tell her. ‘Look.’ We are standing in my neighbour’s yard. It’s five in the morning. The light is grey, the metal kindergarten-yellow. I take Jude’s hand and place it on the side of the machine.

‘It’s a bulldozer,’ she says absently.

‘What did you think it was?’ I ask her.

‘What?’

‘Nothing, Jude. Don’t worry.’

I know she forgets when she’s feeling better, but I can’t help testing her. I am hoping I will catch her out one day, find proof that she’s been faking all along.

‘Jude, look at me.’ I snap a few shots of her leaning on the machine, even though I know they will all turn out with her same vacant stare. In some ways, her moments of clarity are harder. There is no longer a chance of reprieve.

I am eleven years old, and Jude is in the hospital having tests. Actually, the results are already known. Mum isn’t ready to tell me yet.

I should be able to guess. All her favourite things are here with her, a circle of talismans. Her Walkman is lying on the bed. She is drugged and pale, but there are no machines or drips in the room like a normal hospital, and no telephone.

My sister is listening to ‘Cecilia’, rewinding it, and listening again.

‘I could make you a tape of just that song if you want,’ I offer. ‘Over and over again.’

‘Saint Cecilia is the patron saint of musicians,’ my sister drones.

‘Do you want me to?’

‘Saint Cecilia is the patron saint of musicians.’

‘Jude, do you want me to make the tape or not?’

‘No.’ She is too listless to shake her head at me. ‘Then it would be a different song each time.’

I want to yell at her and bang my fists against the metal bed frame. Shake her out of it. I hate this place. I hate the way my sister has been turned into a zombie, and I hate her when she’s not one too. I walk out of the room, past my mother, who is talking to the doctor and doesn’t notice me, and climb the fire stairs to the roof. When I get to the top, the door is locked and bolted, and I trudge back down. No one even notices I was gone.